Meditation Instruction, Asheville, NC

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Bill Walz began his journey into the possibilities for expanded and healthier human experience in the 70’s San Francisco Bay milieu of the Human Potential movement. His formal and informal psychological studies feature as primary Western psychological influences the brilliance of Carl Jung, Carl Rogers, Viktor Frankl, Wilhelm Reich, Sydney Jourard, Fritz Perls and the Gestaltists. His clinical training emphasized social psychology, behaviorism, the ego psychologies, systems/family work and the medical model. Having practiced clinical psychology for fifteen years before breaking away into teaching a more transpersonal perspective, he thoroughly understands professional mental health practices, psychopharmacology and psycho-diagnostics.

This thorough Western training is balanced with influences from Native American, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish and Christian wisdom and healing traditions. The Buddhist traditions, particularly Zen, are the most influential. A week-long meditation retreat and intensive on Buddhist psychology with Thich Nhat Hanh in 1997 profoundly confirmed his personal beliefs and experience and set in motion a dramatic alteration in his approach to personal growth and healing. The writings of Alan Watts and Krishnamurti and the contemporary teachings of Eckhart Tolle and Gangaji both strongly influence and parallel his own conclusions and practice.

Originally academically trained in cultural anthropology, he has always sought to understand individual human circumstance within larger cultural and evolutionary contexts. It was during these studies that he first encountered the millennial genius of the French theologian and anthropologist Tielhard de Chardin whose vision of humanity’s evolutionary journey into consciousness he shares. With a nod to de Chardin, he often refers to his teachings and work as The Omega Journey.